Barringtonia asiatica

Finding this picture on the internet finally brought an end to a search which I have been pursuing intermittently these last few years. It arose from the memories I have of breakfasts when I was growing up in East Africa, when one of the servants would place a frangipani flower floating in a dish of water in the middle of the table - except at one house, the Hoey House, where we spent the glorious summer holiday of 1957. There, an even more exotic flower appeared on the table, picked from a tree in the garden which, we were told, was very uncommon in East Africa.

I remember it as being called a 'moonflower' for, like the frangipani, it flowers at night, but this must have been a local name as searches for it produced nothing. It's actually Barringtonia asiatica (fish poison tree, putat, sea poison tree, or box fruit tree), a tree native to mangrove habitats from islands of the Indian Ocean in the west to tropical Asia and the islands of the western Pacific. The fruit is about 9 cm long, egg- or lantern-shaped, green at first than turning brown when ripe. Importantly, it floats and can survive in the sea for long distances and for periods of up to 2 years. So perhaps, by some fluke, a seed was washed up on the beach below the Hoey House and then planted beside the annex building where it grew into a tree.

The flowers appear on a long spike from the centre of a leaf group and are formed of four white petals cupping a profusion of white filaments tipped with pink. Like the frangipani, the flowers produce a wonderful scent which attracts bats and moths to pollinate it. Strangely, I don't remember the tips as being pink but as a rich yellow.

So a small mystery is solved. As always, I'm not very sure that anything profound in life has been achieved by identifying the plant: it just seems.... tidier.

Image courtesy Wikipedia.